Play Life, Live Games: Can we return to a time of civility?

Dusty Ricketts More Content Now

Friday

Aug 23, 2019 at 8:33 AM

Some truly great things have come from social media. It’s easier than ever to reconnect with old friends, you can find new friends who share the same interests and passions as you and there are so many funny animal videos floating around.

But social media, and the internet in general, have created a new way for people to be horrible to one another. And the video game fandom can be pretty horrible with this.

Last week, some developers from Respawn Entertainment did a Q&A on Reddit to apologize for a temporary change they made to their game “Apex Legends” that increased the prices for some of the items in the game.

The Q&A did not go well and devolved into the “fans” making death threats against the developers and saying vulgar things about their families. It only got worse when the developers started to get upset and responded with their own, milder vitriol.

I had my own brush with cyberbullying this week as well. For the past few years I’ve been a member of a Facebook group interested in getting more single-player content added to video games, especially the Star Wars Battlefront series. The group received some great news this week when EA announced that a new offline mode would be added to “Star Wars Battlefront 2” late next month.

At launch, the new mode will only be available on levels from the prequel trilogy despite the game having worlds from all three eras of the Skywalker Saga.

I made an innocuous comment about being excited for the mode while being disappointed it wasn’t going to include all eras of Star Wars. For the next hour, a fellow member of the group attacked me, cussed me out, called me entitled and just said a lot of horrible stuff. People like that don’t want to have a conversation. Their only goal is make people upset and draw out a response from their target.

We’re not all going to agree all the time, but that doesn’t mean we have to resort to vitriol. Engage in a civil conversation, don’t just react with hate. More than anything, just be nice to one another.Dusty Ricketts is the editor of The Destin Log and The Walton Sun newspapers and can be reached at dricketts@thedestinlog.com.